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In an interview with BW Businessworld, Omar Sherief Mohammad, Cluster Head India, Middle East & Africa - Roche Diabetes Care, talks about company, values and more
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Tell us a little bit about your company. What is your primary offering? Who are your customers? How many people will you employ? When was it founded?
Roche Diabetes Care has been pioneering innovative diabetes technologies and services for more than 40 years.
Being a global leader in integrated Personalised Diabetes Management (iPDM), Roche Diabetes Care collaborates with thought leaders around the globe, including people with diabetes, caregivers, healthcare providers and payers. Roche Diabetes Care aims to transform and advance care provision and foster sustainable care structures.
Under the brands RocheDiabetes, Accu-Chek and mySugr, comprising glucose monitoring, insulin delivery systems and digital solutions, Roche Diabetes Care unites with its partners to create patient-centred value. By building and collaborating in an open ecosystem, connecting devices and digital solutions as well as contextualising relevant data points, Roche Diabetes Care enables deeper insights and a better understanding of the disease, leading to personalised and effective therapy adjustments. For better outcomes and true relief.
At Roche Diabetes Care, we have set ourselves the goal to become an innovation leader in our industry, bringing true relief to people with diabetes by offering the best solutions to manage their disease.
We are a team of 240 people in India with the vision that “By 2025 we will help people with diabetes everywhere think less about their daily diabetes routine so they can get true relief, day and night.
Can you share some bit about the culture and value system of your organization?
Managing increased complexity requires us as a Diabetes Care organisation to shift to an even more agile, adaptive and collaborative mindset.
[email protected] describes the mindset, culture and behaviours we as Diabetes Care colleagues strive to adopt to help achieve our vision and realize our strategy.
Our five mindset dimensions help us on what is collectively important to us and provide examples of behaviours we would like to demonstrate.
We encourage everyone in the organisation to develop an Entrepreneurial, Collaborative and Growth mindset; think like entrepreneurs, turning ideas into action, leading the way in all their actions, collaborating & using resources effectively and managing risk. Welcome challenges and drive our own development & learning keeping the future in mind. We come together around common customer-centric goals in agile team formations, giving rise to a collaborative approach to problem solving.
How would you define your people's satisfaction and culture when it comes to employees?
The happiness and engagement of our people is pivotal to our success. We have continuously echoed that we are, without a doubt, stronger together.
Building the right culture of how we all work together towards making our patients' lives better each day. We continuously ask ourselves “How do we match our Talent to Value.”?
To enable us to focus on our Talent, one of the priorities for us is to look at internal and external benchmarks to continuously build our culture & engagement as we believe it’s a journey.
Our Employee Opinion Survey provides a comprehensive and detailed view of how our employees are doing and what they feel about our culture and workplace.
In addition, we look outside to benchmark ourselves with the market best practices. GPTW gives us the platform to understand and deepen our learning to continuously develop in this ever changing environment.
Why is it a Great Place to Work? And what have you done to get to this level?
We enable our people to Re-imagine their careers; support them to connect their aspirations to our purpose of bringing true relief to patients.
We trust our people and encourage them to be viciously innovative and act as entrepreneurs. We have been coaching our people to be bold and courageously authentic which has helped us in improving many aspects of our business and led to process improvements and increase in productivity.
As leaders we have realised that building a reverse mentoring process and listening to our people is critical to succeed in the new world. As rightly said by Marshall Goldsmith “What Got You Here Won't Get You There”. We continuously encourage our employees to develop a growth mindset by asking the right questions on how it is serving to improve the lives of people with diabetes everywhere.
When our people are living their aspiration; they act as a catalyst to attract the right talent. In Roche, we believe that everyone has potential and it’s the right role that ignites the fulfillment factor in a person.
How do you ensure on a daily basis that your organization remains a Great place to work?
We invest a lot of time and effort in getting together to collaborate. Which means that we come together as Teams, Agile Squads, Quick Response Teams, etc, very frequently to bring out better collaboration, agility, innovation and entrepreneurial thinking. This in turn results in a growth mindset, encouraging employees to self-drive a culture of excellence and connection to our purpose and to the patient. We also have forums like town-halls, check-ins, team huddles, work process teams etc. to help drive efficiency with two-way feedback.. These forums also double-up as a stage for recognising creative & innovative solutions by employees. An “Innovation Mela” held every year recognises diverse teams which come together to work on ideas that help the organization reach its purpose. Employees open to taking up challenges beyond the organization are offered “Express Development Opportunities” in overseas Roche affiliates for the short - term, bringing them closer to their career aspirations and developing a networked mindset.
Work style and culture has changed since the pandemic considering that most have been working remotely. What have you done as an organization to ensure that people are motivated and productive?
We are in the healthcare space, and more so at the frontlines of the defence against Diabetes in India. Hence, while on the ground or online, our employees have been tirelessly focused on bringing true relief to patients, supporting healthcare practitioners. In fact, during the pandemic, comorbidities like Diabetes have taken center stage, putting our employees under even more pressure to serve.
These events triggered the need to bring new business processes and a new set of behaviours that are aligned with Roche’s Safety Health and Environment (SHE) objectives on protecting, promoting health, educating, motivating SHE, ensuring safe and healthy workplaces. In this regard, we took the following initiatives aligned with Roche SHE objectives:
We launched a comprehensive wellness programme called Livewell365 in April 2020. This was a holistic well-being programme that focussed on change in mindset and behaviour while focusing on seven key wellness elements that have an impact on an individual’s health and wellbeing.
Apart from implementing various hygiene steps, we adopt a Figital mode (face-to-face and digital mode) of working. The field colleagues leveraged digital means of engagement to generate prescriptions and orders and met face-to-face only when required, following all safety measures.